Corwin’s Techdirt Comments

There is one way

And the FLOSS guys are too damn incompetent to git dat dun, or it would have been made fucking eons ago.

WHAT is the model of the ONLY software that's entirely reliant on USERS just being THERE?

FLAT. P2P. SWARM.

There is ZERO excuse as of now to build any sort of service that needs to be HOSTED in centralized, easy-to-raid locations, unless it's being built so as to be easy to shut down.

The only service that serves data you can be CERTAIN will hold the data, is the one where YOU serve the data, on YOUR hardware. Then you'd store data for others, so that others store your data, too, and encrypted in such a way that you demonstrably can't access what others store on your device.

NO-ONE is going to fund that, and FLOSS hobbyists aren't professional enough to package those simple, simple services in ways that Normal People can setup with ONE TAP on ANY device. Or just point at a QR code to automagically have all their apps and data migrated to UserCloud instead of WalledGarden.

What sort of idiots

runs a business in such a way that it's vulnerable to such trolling AT ALL?

Internet is WORDWIDE, remember? HOST YOUR APP STORE IN P2P, RIGHT THERE IN THE PHONES. No software patents applied or enforced there. I'm way past caring about all the poor idiot 'Murrican devs and businesses who can't figure out the meaning of jurisdiction. WHEN THE SOLUTION IS JUST THAT BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS.

But it's "forbidden" because you have to "comply" with "regulations"? Why? Come on, try and stop the bits, BRING IT ON. Internet CAN and DOES take on censorship and WIN.
Reality doesn't care for laws, because it's made of things that still exist when no-one believes in them. Laws stop existing when no-one believes in them. Bits exist, I've seen them, but I've never seen a regulation pop up in my TCP packets.

As for "but devs could be raided" : hahaha lolno. They'd have to raid all of everyone who ever downloaded the Android Dev Toolkit or XCode. And all the publishers, i.e. everyone who owns a phone/tablet/whatever. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

This makes no sense. Oh, yeah, so they'd be barred from using French bank accounts to pay and get paid for ads and shit. Like that's critically important for business. Yeah, right.

WHAT are they gonna do? If it was physical goods it'd be easy to stop them at borders or something, but it's a website. How could France punish a website for not paying up this censorship-based racketeering? Or stop it from operating? There are hundreds of sites that extract and sort and filter Twitter feeds, would they try and stop those? It's impossible.

It means that CENTRALIZED doesn't work.

What sort of idiots... Look, the only service you can be certain will NOT be stopped is the one you run yourself. So, the client must be the server. Else, it WILL get raided or abandoned or cut off funds or something, at some point.

Now imagine a p2p news-spreader system borne exclusively within the browser. You are the cloud as long as you're using the site. Theoretically, the system works as long as SOMEone else is using it at the instant you start using it. Sort of NewsTorrent.

Peer-to-peer, flat, mesh network : Problem solved. (The "mesh" part is not all that solved, but "how to build a service that resists everything" is. The answer is "the server is the cloud of users, and crypto-sign everything as if you trust no-one".)

Why shouldn't all laws be proposed and voted by the people directly?

Once more, with feeling

"An Internet service that was hosted on a central server located under US jurisdiction has been shut down because regulatory capture."

Two articles per day on TechDirt to repeat over and over that you can't set up any innovation in the US.

But... there is no regulation on reality. Get over it. Build the service as fully-distributed P2P and PROBLEM FUCKING SOLVED FOREVER. Can't stop "hosting@Home" over TOR and I2P with all transactions in Bitcoins.

Distributed systems. The server is the swarm. That's the one and only way. You can't do more resilient than a net of equal independent agents.

I have exactly zero sympathy for those morons who insist on following regulations and get shut down because of the regulations they never knew, or failed at seeming to follow.

But then you wouldn't be founding a company with VC money for hockey-stick returns, you'd be building something that will enrich you no more than any other user of your system.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

I think they're just seeing it as one more revenue stream. The interesting details are the script copies, the short window, and the whole "the US is the world" myopia. There may be more interesting details further, but it's 4AM here and time to try to sleep.

Re: Re: Re:

I see what you're getting at, but I think it's important that they're doing it. They're even doing it better than they realize.

They're accepting downloads under short windows, and theater operators (stop calling them owners, they're semi-independent at best) will shut up and like it or face a dearth of movies. It's not like studios don't own the distributors who control who gets to screen what.

They're selling copies of the script. How many people will begin writing because of those copies? Even if none directly. Maybe some fanfic will use a throwaway line from there and make it a meme. How influential on how many future writers in how long a time? No cultural artifact is truly useless.

That's just one, two details off the top of my head. The business is changing, and although they're too stupid to understand exactly how, they're still going in a direction that's not completely wrong : it involves the audience in the process. So what if it's the financing part of movie making? It's still power to the people.

Yeah, they'll try to sell it twice. So what? Kickstart it then torrent the movie, problem solved.

They're doing DRM wrong

If it was true that their servers were doing much computation, then the game would be basically uncrackable.

It's not.

That is SO MUCH FAIL that I can't put it in words. They could have made a game for which producing the crack would mean re-programming all the server-side parts, which is flat-out impossible in the kind of time frame crackers release their warez. Unless their crack does hack into the EA servers directly itself, or is basically a standalone server (which means copying the server software from EA if they don't release it which they wouldn't so it means hacking EA or getting it leaked).

So EA just had an occasion to make the first DRM to ever work, and they blew it. So much fail.

Re:

That's a good thing. It means they want to listen to fans. Or fans' money, but then spending money for a copy of the script certainly is a powerful message directly to the content producer. Speaking producer language. "TAKE MY MONEY" - now here is something they can understand.

Good idea!

So they'll prove AGAIN that innovation IS plagiarism!

My mom invented and patented a process that was stupidly obvious, and successfully defended it in court against a bigger company that never got that process right in years of R&D. (So, maybe it wasn't THAT obvious.) The patent is now public domain, and that's why YOU probably encountered a product using that same process.

But it wasn't as good as ours. Because everyone copied our process, but no-one copied our quality. No-one in our industry ever tries to even approach the level of purity of our product. But we also suck at marketing, so importers and distributors won't carry our brand because they figure there is no demand for it. (While selling worse knock-offs, go figure that.)

We changed a whole industry, but we're not selling much. But YOU can get the result, sort of, because other producers copied the process. At least you benefit from the idea. Because other producers copied the process.

But... they do not make the same product we do. We're still making the highest-quality money can buy, the best in its category. But, if they're not using the same processes in the other parts of manufacturing the product, then that product is in a different category, and it might be just as good as what we do.

THAT is innovation. Tying a new process into existing products, adapting new processes to obsolete material, testing new material for efficiency in abandoned processes, THAT'S WHAT PROGRESS MEANS.

So, telling the same story a dozen times by ripping off the latest success in some genre? That's always been done and always will. Copyright is irrelevant, it's an historical accident and the idea that ideas can be owned is ridiculous and will be recognized as such in law shortly, because it's becoming too fucking evident to ignore.